Late in the autumn of 2009 Algeier Wendy, the editor in chief of the prestigious Hungarian Kertbarát Magazin (The Garden Lover’s Magazine) wrote me to congratulate to my gardening blog and to ask me whether I would feel like writing about something for the Magazine. I love to write, so I gathered a few themes to her to choose what to write about. She chose them all. This is how this series of articles was born.

In the January-February edition you can read Wendy’s interview with me. I am satisfied with it, and I even told to Wendy that if I made a sociological survey any more in my life, I would happily employ her as an interviewer. In the March-April edition I write about ground covers. In May-June about – what else – the roses. In July-August about hostas. In the September-October issue I published two articles, one on bushes with beautifully coloring leaves in the autumn, and another on alternative fruits. Finally, in the November-December edition I wrote about plants that are also decorative in winter.

Just now I received my articles also in pdf format, so from now on you can read them both here, on Río Wang and in my garden diary. Unfortunately in Hungarian only, but I hope my photos will compensate you for the mysterious content. Click on the thumbnails to read or download them in pdf, depending on how you have set up pdf management.

We have also agreed on a series of articles for 2011, to which I gave the title English garden – in collaboration with nature. It begins like this:

The English garden is similar to Chinese cuisine not only as far as it is the best in the world in its own genre, but also in the fact that in order to reach this, it does not use special and expensive materials but ingeniously simple techniques. With their help, you can create even at home a splendid garden without any particular and expensive plants, a lot of money and much work.

To be continued in the Kertbarát Magazin, in the next year. Happy New Year to you all!

Before arriving to Mut, the most populous center of the oasis of Dakhla in the Egyptian Western Desert is the little medieval jewel of El-Qasr. It lies between the fresh vegetation growing at its southern edge and the delicate pink and white cliffs protecting it from the north and surrounding a large part of the oasis. The adobe walls have already lost almost all the polychrome plaster decoration that used to cover them, but their enduring vestiges speak of a rich past of commerce, schools, life. The elaborate woodwork of the doorposts and the solitude of the patios tell about a history beginning with the Roman military origins of the place which rose to the range of a cultural center in the Ottoman period (1516-1798). Of course there are also some scattered stones with hieroglyphic inscriptions from unidentifiable ancient temples. The inhabitants used to produce olive oil, exported corn and dates, and worked as carpenters and blacksmiths. It was just recently depopulated. Although there is some governmental program of maintenance and you can see scattered groups of masons repairing the walls or simply protecting themselves from the sun, El-Qasr will barely survive this neglect. Nowadays its only hope is in selling to the highly contradictory tourism its soul to save its body (or vice versa).

Sándor Kányádi, when applying the image of the cycle of nature to history and thus making understandable and supportable with the metaphor of the approaching winter that massive and irreversible destruction which took place in the past century not only in Transylvania, but in the whole of Eastern Europe, either consciously or unconsciously followed the example of those – Transylvanian and European – Humanist predecessors who, perhaps also for their own comfort, explained and represented as inevitable with the cycles of human life and nature the rise and decline of nations. The winter as a metaphor for desperate historical situations has a long tradition and is still alive in the literature of various peoples.

In Hungarian its most famous example is undoubtedly the last two stanzas of Mihály Vörösmarty’s Foreword, written “in Baracska, in the late winter of 1850-51”, which expands to cosmic proportions the tragedy of the lost war of independence of 1848-49 and the subsequent bloody retaliation. The introductory verse of the penultimate stanza, “Now it’s winter and snow and silence and death” is a well-known topos for every Hungarian even if they do not remember anything else of the poem. The particular cruelty of the poem is that while the winter metaphor implicitly includes the possibility of a nearing spring, Vörösmarty explicitly states that the spring, even if it will come, will be just a lie.

Now it’s winter and snow and silence and death.
The earth has turned white.
Not hair by hair like a happy man:
it turned white at once, like God
who, having created the world and man,
this half-god and half-animal being
was horrified over the grim work
and turned white and old in his sorrow.

Later will come the hairdresser, the spring,
and the old earth will perhaps take a wig,
she will dress in the velvet of flowers
the ice will thaw on her glass eyes
and on her cheek camouflaged with perfumes
she will lie cheerfulness and youth.
Ask then this aged coquette:
where has she put her unhappy children?

For our generation, if on a different poetic level, but a similar role was played by a song written by János Bródy after the state of emergency introduced on 13 December 1981 in Poland and the suppression of the Solidarity movement. The song, though at that time was broadcasted on the radio, could be first published on LP only after the change of the regime, on the album “1977-1990” performed by Zorán Sztevanovity.

János Bródy – Zorán Sztevanovity: Do not wait for May. From the album 1977-1990 (1990)

Get ready for the long winter, my dear,
because the winter will be long, I think
Keep the warmth of your heart for me
and I will guard the light of your eyes

Pick up everything that remains
and just slowly burn up the desire
turn the flame down, my dear
we will still need the fire, I think

Do not wait for May, for winter is nearing
do not wait for May, my dear
dress up well when you step out to the street
and if you’re cold, get down in the bed with me

Be gentle, serene and silent
and put up a wise smile if you’re hurt
Become a river, and when winter attacks
you’ll have an armor, hard and white

Get ready for the long winter, my dear,
because the winter will be long, I think

Kata remembers it like this: “I do not know whether János Bródy wrote it on that occasion or not, but to me this song is clearly linked to the suppression of Solidarność. We were then twenty years old, we were looking forward to life to open to us, to be in love and to be happy. We just wanted to go to a concert of Tamás Cseh when we learned the news. Life was all of a sudden darkened and locked away by Jaruzelski’s rise to power. We were sitting with my friend in my tiny room, the former servant’s hall of a former bourgeois apartment, and talking about that now everything is over, and that we have to expect a durable repression and the hardening of the dictatorship also in Hungary. Judit told that there was only a single slice left to us from life, and it was love. I heard this song immediately after that. And the coming years in fact were about this, that in the long winter people tried to obtain from each other the fullness and spaciousness of life, which necessarily led to tragedies. So this song still today evokes the servant’s hall, and still my stomach tightens just as thirty years ago, and I recall those people whom I saw getting spoiled in those years.”

One of the finest examples of the winter metaphor, however, comes from Iran, from one of the greatest Iranian poets of the 20th century, the creator of Persian free verse, Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1928-1990), of whom we have already translated some poems. His poem Zemestân ast – It’s winter is still so important in Iran that the greatest living musicians, the repeatedly quoted Mohammad Reza Shajarian (vocals) Hossein Alizadeh (tar), Kayhan Kalhor (kamanche) and the younger Shajarian (tombak) – the Masters of Persian Music – have set it to music and perform it, and this music accompanies also Rafi Pitts’ successful and gloomy film of 2006 about the daily life in Teheran’s poor neighborhoods, which also bears the same title.

Here below, after the Persian text and English translation of the poem we also include the full concert recording of It’s winter by the Masters in Los Angeles, December 2001 (41 minutes). If you are not yet accustomed to the meditative Persian music, then listen first to the some minutes long detail of the concert illustrated with the photos of two young Iranian photographers, Ehsan Amini and Hamed Masoumi whose pictures also accompany this post. The flash video includes only the last stanza with English subtitles. We do not insert it here, just give a link to it, so you can watch it full size.

As we have written several times already, the musicality of the language and the play with the accidental assonance of words is such an integral part of Persian poetry that it is virtually impossible to translate it to any language. Therefore we only give a more or less literal translation, complemented below with the audio recordings of the poem. This time the translation is not ours, but the widely used one by Mahvash Shahegh, which in some places slightly differs from the original text, and to which we have added in gray the translation of those few verses which, for some unknown reason, were missing from her text.

They are not going to answer your greeting
Their heads are in their collars

Nobody is going to raise his head
To answer a question or to see a friend
The eyes cannot see beyond the feet
The road is dark and slick
If you stretch a friendly hand towards anybody
He hardly brings his hand out of his pocket
For the cold is so bitter

The breath coming out of your chest
Turns into a dark cloud
And stands like a wall in front of your eyes
While your own breath is like this
What do you expect from your distant or close friends?

My gentle Messiah, O, dirty dressed monk
The weather is so ungently cold
You be warm and happy
You answer my greeting and open the door

It is me, your nightly guest, an unhappy gypsy;
It is me, a kicked up, afflicted stone
It is me, a low insult of creation, an untuned melody.

I am neither white nor black, * I am colorless
Come and open the door, see how cheerless I am
O, my dear host, your nightly guest is shivering outside
There is no hail outside, no death;
If you hear any sound, it is the sound of cold and teeth.

I came tonight to repay the loan

to put down my bond beside your cup

What are you saying, that
It is too late, it is dawn, it is day?That’s an illusion! What you see on the sky
Is not the redness after dawn
It is the result of the winter’s slap
On the sky’s cheeks

And the lantern of the sky, whether dead or alive,

Is covered by the thick coffin of the darkness.

O, partner go and get the wine ready
Days and nights are the same

They are not going to answer your greeting
The air is gloomy, doors are closed,
The heads are in collars, the hands are hidden,
The breaths are clouds, the people are tired and sad,
The trees are crystallized skeletons, the earth is low-spirited
The roof of the sky is low
The sun and moon are hazy
It’s winter

On this recording the poem is recited by Mahvash Shahegh, while on the following video by Mehdi Akhavan Sales himself, who was also an excellent performer.